How to Complete Jet Set Willy on ZX Spectrum Without the Infinite Lives Cheat

Dan Cole — Technical Editor, RetroInHand

Last updated: May 2026

🛒 Where to Buy

→ ZX Spectrum 48KBest for: authentic original hardware experience
→ ZX Spectrum NextBest for: modern faithful recreation
→ Recreated ZX Spectrum Bluetooth KeyboardBest for: desk display and emulation
→ RGCD Jet Set Willy cartridgeBest for: physical media collectors
→ Raspberry Pi 400Best for: affordable emulation setup

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The Game That Broke a Generation of British Kids

I was nine years old the first time I played Jet Set Willy. My uncle had a rubber-keyed Spectrum 48K sitting on a chipboard desk in his back bedroom, loaded from a cassette that took four minutes to load and had a 30% chance of failing on any given attempt. When it did load, I died in the first thirty seconds. I died the next thirty times after that. I thought the game was broken. Twenty-odd years later, I know the game actually was broken — but not in the way nine-year-old me thought.

Released in 1984 by Software Projects, Jet Set Willy is the sequel to Manic Miner, and it’s one of the most famous, most played, and most infuriating games ever made on British soil. It was also shipped with several critical bugs that made legitimate completion impossible without applying the correct POKE fixes. This is not optional reading. If you’re attempting to complete Jet Set Willy on PAL ZX Spectrum without the infinite lives cheat, you absolutely must understand the bug situation before you start — otherwise you’re not playing a hard game, you’re playing an unwinnable one.

This guide covers everything: the setup you need, the bugs and how to fix them properly, a full room-by-room walkthrough with item locations, boss strategies, the genuinely horrible sections that have eaten thousands of lives over the decades, and what happens when you actually finish it. No save states, no infinite lives. Just Willy, a mansion full of debris, and a cook who will not let you go to bed.

What You Need to Know Before You Start: Hardware, Bugs, and Setup

Which Version Are You Actually Running?

This matters enormously. The original 1984 release by Software Projects is the one with the bugs. There were later rereleases and compilations — including versions bundled on the Your Sinclair covertape scene — and some of these had partial fixes applied. If you’re playing on original hardware from a tape you bought in 1984, you need to apply the POKEs manually. If you’re playing on an emulator like Fuse or Spectaculator, or on a ZX Spectrum Next, you may well be running a pre-patched version, but you should check.

The definitive version for serious play is the bug-fixed ROM that circulates in the emulation community, sometimes called the “fixed” or “corrected” version. This has all four major bugs addressed. I’d strongly recommend this if you’re emulating. If you’re on original hardware and want the authentic experience — which, honestly, is the only real reason to do this without infinite lives — you need the POKEs.

The Four Bugs That Will Kill Your Run

I cannot stress this enough: two of these bugs make specific rooms permanently lethal regardless of your skill level. Playing without fixing them isn’t a hardcore challenge — it’s a softlock waiting to happen.

Bug 1: The Attic. This is the most notorious. The room called The Attic contains a guardian that, due to a memory corruption error, writes bad data into the game as soon as you enter the room. This corrupts several other rooms, making them impassable and killing Willy on contact with the floor. You can apply the POKE fix: POKE 35136,0. On original hardware, type this into the BASIC prompt before running the game.

Bug 2: The Banyan Tree. The Banyan Tree room contains an item that is physically impossible to collect due to incorrect guardian sprite data causing a permanent death loop when you approach it. POKE fix: POKE 34936,4.

Bug 3: The Skylab Landing Bay. A guardian in this room can knock Willy off the screen entirely, causing the game to freeze or crash. POKE fix: POKE 56876,4.

Bug 4: Wrong number of items. The game’s internal item counter is set incorrectly in some versions, meaning you can collect every visible item and still never trigger the ending. Fix: POKE 55920,4. This one is subtle and particularly cruel because you can do everything right and still fail.

Apply all four. Don’t argue with this. You’re not making the game easier — you’re making it actually completable, which is what the developers presumably intended before shipping it in this state. Matthew Smith, the game’s creator, was seventeen when he made it and has never given a fully satisfying explanation for the bugs. The man’s a legend, but quality assurance was not his strongest suit.

Playing on Emulator vs Original Hardware

If you’re playing on original hardware and getting your Spectrum signal onto a modern display, that’s a whole conversation in itself. The composite output on most Spectrums is fine for CRT televisions, but if you’re using something like a PVM or a modern flat panel, you’ll want to look at your signal chain carefully. The display lag on even a fast modern TV can make the precise pixel-perfect jumps in JSW noticeably harder — not impossibly so, but harder. I always play on a CRT when I’m doing a serious run. Fuse on a PC with a keyboard is honestly the most consistent option for emulation, and the key mapping is easy to set up.

If you’re interested in playing PAL retro titles on modern hardware more broadly, our guide on whether you can play PAL ROMs on the Anbernic RG35XX without lag is worth reading — the input lag question comes up constantly with Spectrum emulation specifically, where timing is everything.

Understanding How Jet Set Willy Actually Works

The Core Mechanics

Jet Set Willy is a room-based platformer with 60 rooms spread across Willy’s mansion and its grounds. You play as Willy, the miner from Manic Miner who has struck it rich, bought a mansion, thrown a party, and now needs to collect all the items left behind by his guests before his housekeeper Maria will let him go to bed. That’s the entire plot. It’s brilliant.

You have five lives. No continues, no checkpoints. When they’re gone, that’s it. You start from the very beginning every single time. Unlike Manic Miner, where you were progressing linearly through levels, JSW is open-world — you can move between rooms freely, though some rooms are much harder to enter than others, and some require you to have approached from a specific direction at a specific height.

Willy can walk left and right and jump. That’s it. No crouching, no attacking, no special moves. The jump arc is fixed. You cannot change it mid-air. This is crucial to understand: every jump in this game is committed the moment you press the key. You need to learn the exact timing and position for every significant jump in the game, because there is no correction available once you’re airborne.

The Guardian System

Guardians are the moving enemies in each room. Most move on a fixed horizontal or vertical path. A few have more complex patterns. Contact with any guardian kills Willy instantly and costs a life. What makes guardians particularly nasty is that many of them also block collectible items — you have to navigate past them to reach the item, then navigate back without being touched.

Guardians don’t stop when you’re not in the room. Their position when you re-enter depends on how long you’ve been away and what path you took, which means retrying a room doesn’t guarantee you’ll see the same guardian positions twice. This adds a significant luck element to some rooms that you cannot fully train away. Accept it now. It’ll save you a lot of frustration.

Willy’s Death Mechanics

There are three ways to die: touching a guardian, falling too far (the game has a fall damage system — fall too far and Willy simply expires), and touching certain coloured cells that act as hazards. The fall distance that kills you is approximately the height of Willy himself — so one platform’s height is often survivable, two usually isn’t. This varies slightly by room geometry, and I’ve been killed by drops that looked identical to ones I’ve survived before. The hitbox is pixel-level unforgiving.

Full Room-by-Room Walkthrough: The Correct Route

There are 60 rooms and 83 items to collect in the bug-fixed version. I’m going to give you the most efficient route through the mansion rather than a purely exhaustive list, because attempting every room in a random order will cost you lives needlessly. The strategy here is to hit the accessible, low-difficulty rooms first to bank as many items as possible, then tackle the brutal rooms when you’ve had chance to learn their patterns.

Starting Area: The Bathroom and Ground Floor

Step 1. You begin in The Bedroom. This is your safe room — there are no guardians and one item sitting visibly on a platform. Collect it and get comfortable with the controls. This is also your landmark room for orientation: the mansion essentially spirals out from here.

Step 2. Move left into The Master Bedroom. One guardian moving horizontally, fairly slow. The item is above the guardian’s path — time your approach for when the guardian is at the far right, grab the item, and drop back down. Don’t try to be clever with jumps here. Simple in, simple out.

Step 3. Continue left into On the Roof. This is where the game begins to show its teeth. There are two items here and a gap in the roofline that will kill you if you drift too far left. Collect the right-hand item first, then work across to the left-hand item. Don’t rush it.

Step 4. Drop down to The Kitchen. Four items here, two guardians. The kitchen has a conveyor belt mechanic in the lower section — the floor moves Willy left whilst he’s standing on it, and this will push him into the guardian if you’re not paying attention. Counter it by holding right while collecting the lower items.

Step 5. Work through The Ballroom, The Ballroom East, and The Wine Cellar in sequence. These three rooms contain 11 items collectively and are relatively forgiving. The Wine Cellar’s items are slightly tricky because of low ceilings that clip Willy’s jump arc — you need shorter, more controlled jumps rather than full-height leaps.

Step 6. Head into The Back Stairway and The Entrance Hall. The Back Stairway has a notorious item at the top of a jump sequence that requires you to be within about four pixels horizontally of a specific point. I spent an entire evening on this one item early on before I realised I was jumping from the wrong step. Use the bottom of the third staircase tile as your launch point.

The Grounds: Exterior Rooms

Step 7. Exit through The Front Door into the exterior rooms. The Esplanade, The Beach, and The Yacht contain some of the game’s most visually distinctive areas and a decent chunk of items. The Yacht is pleasingly open and the guardians here are slow enough to read easily.

Step 8. Tackle The Swimming Pool area next. This is genuinely beautiful for a 1984 Spectrum game — the blue palette work is great. There’s an item on the diving board that requires a very precise jump from the pool’s edge. Too short and you fall in (and die). Too long and you overshoot the board entirely. The correct launch point is flush against the left wall of the board platform.

Step 9. Work through The Garden, The Conservatory, and The Tree Top. The Tree Top is where things start getting properly difficult. There are multiple guardians at different heights, and the platforms are narrow. The item in the upper-right corner of this room has ended more runs than I can count. The trick is to use the leftmost narrow platform as a staging point and wait for the upper guardian to be at the far left before making your jump to the item.

The Upper Floors: Where the Real Difficulty Lives

Step 10. The First Landing and West Wing are your gateway to the upper mansion. The item on the First Landing staircase top is one I always collect last when I’m doing this section, because the approach from below puts you right in the path of a guardian whose timing is awkward. Go for the easier items in the West Wing first, then come back for it.

Step 11. The Nightmare Room. I want to prepare you for this. The Nightmare Room lives up to its name. It has three guardians moving at different speeds on overlapping horizontal paths, and the items are placed right in the centre of the chaos. The only reliable strategy is patience. Stand at the room entrance and watch the guardian pattern for a full cycle — it takes roughly eight seconds. You will see a window of about two to three seconds where all three guardians are stacked on the right side of the room. That is your window to run to the left-hand items. Get in, get them, get back to the wall. Then wait for the second window for the right-hand items. Never try to collect all three items in one pass.

Step 12. The Attic. This is it. The big one. Apply Bug Fix 1 before attempting this room — I cannot emphasise this enough. The Attic, with the bug fixed, is still one of the hardest rooms in the game. The ceiling is low, the platforms are tiny, and the guardian comes at you from an angle that is almost perfectly timed to intercept your natural jump arc. The item is at the top of a series of ascending platforms on the right side of the room. The safest route: hug the left wall going up, use the corner of each platform to break your exposure to the guardian, and collect the item with the guardian at its leftmost position.

Step 13. Work through the remaining upper rooms: The Loft, The Forgotten Abbey, The Off Licence, and the various named rooms across the upper reaches. Many of these have fairly manageable guardian patterns by this point, though The Off Licence has a horrible item above a moving platform that requires you to jump at the peak of the platform’s cycle, not on its way up.

The Notorious Rooms: Specific Strategies

The Banyan Tree (Bug Fix 2 essential): After applying the POKE, this room becomes manageable. The item is on a ledge that requires a long lateral jump from the upper platform. The guardian below patrols slowly — use it as a timing cue. When it’s at the far right wall, jump. You’ll just make the ledge if you start from the full left edge of the upper platform.

Skylab Landing Bay (Bug Fix 3 essential): The skylab room is visually striking and mechanically nasty. The guardian here comes from the top of the screen at irregular-feeling intervals. It’s not actually irregular — it’s on a fixed cycle, but the cycle is long enough that your brain starts to doubt it. Time it. It’s 22 frames between appearances. Count it out loud if you have to. The item is directly below the guardian’s descent path, so you grab it between passes, not on approach.

The Horrible Room: Yes, that’s actually its name. The Horrible Room is, fittingly, horrible. There are six items here across multiple platforms with two guardians moving at different heights. The key insight is that both guardians have a shared three-second window where they’re both on the left half of the room. This window opens every fifteen seconds approximately. Wait for it, collect the two items on the right-hand platforms in that window, then take the remaining items one at a time on subsequent passes. Don’t get greedy.

The Bridge: One item on a bridge platform with a guardian that appears to perfectly block the item at all times. It doesn’t — the guardian has a very slight pause at its leftmost position that creates a one-second window. You need to be mid-jump before that window opens, landing right as the guardian pauses. This requires practice. A lot of practice. I lost two lives here during my successful run, which still stings.

All Collectible Items: Room by Room Checklist

Below is a full checklist of all 83 items by room. These are categorised by difficulty tier so you can plan your route. I’ve marked the ones that require bug fixes with an asterisk.

Tier 1: Easy Items (Collect Early)

The Bedroom — 1 item, no guardians
The Master Bedroom — 1 item, slow guardian
The Ballroom — 3 items, predictable guardian
The Ballroom East — 4 items, conveyor optional
The Wine Cellar — 4 items, low ceiling awareness needed
The Yacht — 3 items, slow guardians
The Beach — 2 items, wide open space
The Esplanade — 2 items, easy jump sequence
The Garden — 2 items, no real threat
The Conservatory — 3 items, medium timing

Tier 2: Medium Items (Mid-Game)

The Kitchen — 4 items, conveyor floor awareness
The Back Stairway — 3 items, specific launch point needed
The Entrance Hall — 2 items, multiple guardians
On the Roof — 2 items, fall hazard
The Swimming Pool — 3 items, precise jump required
The Tree Top — 3 items, multiple guardians
West Wing — 4 items, manageable if patient
The Off Licence — 2 items, platform timing
The Loft — 3 items, tight ceiling

Tier 3: Hard Items (Leave Until Comfortable)

The Nightmare Room — 3 items, pattern memorisation
The Horrible Room — 6 items, window-based collection
The Bridge — 1 item, requires precise jump timing
The Attic* — 1 item, bug fix required, hardest room
The Banyan Tree* — 1 item, bug fix required
Skylab Landing Bay* — 1 item, bug fix required
The Forgotten Abbey — 2 items, complex guardian pattern

The remaining rooms not listed above contain between one and four items each and fall into broadly predictable difficulty ranges. Once you’ve cleared the Tier 1 and 2 items, you’ll have developed enough muscle memory for the game’s jump system to tackle the Tier 3 rooms without feeling completely helpless.

Common Mistakes That Will Kill Your Run

I’ve been keeping a mental list of these for years. Some of them I discovered through personal experience. Most of them I discovered by doing them wrong repeatedly until I understood why.

Not applying the POKEs before starting. I know I’ve said this twice already. I’m saying it again. The single most common reason people report being unable to complete JSW legitimately is that they’ve entered The Attic without the fix applied and then wondered why seemingly unrelated rooms are killing them for no reason. The memory corruption from The Attic bug is not obvious — it affects rooms you’ve already visited and rooms you haven’t reached yet. Apply the POKEs.

Rushing through rooms you’ve already cleared. Jet Set Willy has no memory of which items you’ve collected if you die. When you lose a life, you respawn with the same life count but the room state resets. Items you’ve already collected do stay collected — the game does track this globally across the session. But guardians reset to their starting positions. The mistake is blasting through a previously cleared room assuming it’s safe, only to forget that a guardian now starts in a different position relative to where you entered. Slow down, even in rooms you know.

Treating the fall distance inconsistently. Some players jump off platforms they “know” are safe and get killed, then convince themselves the game is inconsistent. It’s not. The fall death trigger depends on the exact pixel height of the drop plus Willy’s vertical velocity at the moment of landing. A drop that’s safe when you’re walking off an edge might kill you if you jumped and are still descending at full speed. Test falls before committing.

Ignoring the room exit positions. Most rooms have multiple exits, but not all of them put you in a safe position in the adjacent room. Some room transitions drop Willy directly onto a guardian path or into the middle of a moving hazard. The first time you enter a new room, treat it as a reconnaissance run — take stock of where you appear and what’s immediately around you before moving.

Collecting items out of order within a room. In rooms with multiple items and multiple guardians, the order you collect items in genuinely matters because it changes your exposure time to each guardian. Always go for items that require the most exposure to guardian paths last, so that even if you die collecting the hardest item, you’ve already banked the easier ones for next time (remembering that item collection is permanent per session).

Not practising The Bridge. More runs have ended at The Bridge than almost anywhere else because players treat it as a normal room rather than a room that needs dedicated practice. If you find yourself trying The Bridge for the first time with only one or two lives left, you’re going to die there. Either come in with a comfortable life buffer, or spend time on emulator specifically practising the guardian timing before your real run.

Boss Strategies: The Guardian Patterns That Matter Most

Jet Set Willy doesn’t have traditional bosses in the way a game like Manic Miner does — there’s no end-of-level confrontation. Instead, certain guardians function as de facto bosses because they guard critical items and are genuinely hard to avoid. Here are the ones that need specific attention.

The Nightmare Room Trio

Three guardians, overlapping paths, small platforms. As described in the walkthrough section, the key is pattern recognition over pure reflexes. Watch two full cycles of the pattern before moving. The window is real and consistent — about two and a half seconds every fifteen seconds. Do not attempt to squeeze in additional item collection if the window has closed. One item per window, retreat to safety, wait. This is a patience test as much as a skill test.

The Attic Guardian (After Bug Fix)

This guardian is the closest the game comes to a proper boss encounter. It moves on a diagonal path that intersects with almost every viable route to the item. The specific strategy: enter the room from the left, hug the left wall, and climb the platform sequence on the far left side of the room. The guardian’s diagonal path is slightly wider than the left-wall column, meaning it will almost reach you but miss if you’re flush against the wall. The item itself is on the rightmost upper platform, which means you need to cross the guardian’s path once. Do this when the guardian is at the bottom of its travel and moving upward — you’ll have approximately four seconds before it returns to your height.

The Skylab Guardian

After applying Bug Fix 3, this one becomes a matter of timing rather than luck. The guardian descends from the top of the screen in a fixed vertical path. The item is directly below. The reliable method: stand at the left edge of the room, count the guardian’s descent, wait for it to disappear back up, then run to the item, collect it, and return to the left edge before the guardian descends again. Don’t linger. The temptation is to look around the room for anything you might have missed — resist it. Get in, get the item, get out.

Maria the Housekeeper

Maria deserves a mention here even though she’s technically not a guardian in the mechanical sense. She stands at the base of The Staircase permanently, and her presence is what motivates the entire game. When you’ve collected all 83 items, she moves aside and lets Willy go to bed. Seeing her step aside is one of the most satisfying moments in Spectrum gaming history. I genuinely got a bit emotional the first time I saw it legitimately. That’s what this guide is for.

The Ending: What Actually Happens When You Complete Jet Set Willy

When you collect the final item, the game triggers a short congratulatory sequence. Willy climbs the stairs, Maria steps aside, and Willy goes to his bedroom and falls into bed. A tune plays — it’s a slightly music-box rendition of “If I Were a Rich Man” from Fiddler on the Roof, which is either charming or slightly baffling depending on your perspective. I find it charming. The screen then returns to the title screen.

That’s it. There’s no extended ending, no credits roll, no score screen. For 1984, this was completely normal — completing a game was its own reward. The satisfaction comes entirely from the knowledge that you did it, without the infinite lives POKE, on a game that was genuinely designed to kill you repeatedly. The ending is modest. The achievement isn’t.

Matthew Smith originally planned a sequel called Miner Willy Meets the Taxman, which was never completed and never released. A map was shown in press at the time, and it looked like it would have been even larger than JSW. It would also presumably have been even buggier. The world will never know.

Post-Game: What to Do After You’ve Finished

Once you’ve completed JSW legitimately, there are a few meaningful challenges to consider if you want to keep going with the game.

The Speed Run Challenge

JSW has an active speedrunning community. The any% category allows use of the POKEs but not the infinite lives cheat, which aligns perfectly with what this guide has been about. Current world record runs sit under thirty minutes, which is astonishing given that most people’s first legitimate completion takes several hours spread across multiple sessions. Speedrunning JSW requires memorising an optimal item collection order that minimises room transitions, which is a completely different mental model to the safety-first approach in this guide. If that appeals, the Spectrum Scroller Discord is the best starting point for route research.

Manic Miner Revisited

If you haven’t played or replayed Manic Miner recently, completing JSW gives you fresh appreciation for just how much Matthew Smith escalated the difficulty between the two games. Manic Miner (1983) is linear, structured, and — whilst very hard — comprehensible in a way that JSW isn’t. Going back to it after completing JSW feels almost relaxing, which is not something I ever expected to say about Manic Miner.

The Fan-Made Sequels and Remakes

The JSW community has produced dozens of fan-made additions over the decades. Jet Set Willy II: The Final Frontier was the official 1985 sequel from Software Projects, adding 50 new rooms to the original 60. It’s every bit as brutal and also has its own set of bugs. There are also entirely fan-made adventures like Jet Set Willy: The Lord of the Rings Edition and various community-built room editors that let you design your own mansions. These won’t run on original hardware without some faff, but emulation handles them well.

Playing Other PAL Spectrum Classics

Completing JSW puts you in a fairly elite club of people who’ve genuinely experienced the Spectrum at its most demanding. If you want to stay in that space, the natural next stops are Atic Atac, Sabre Wulf, Underwurlde, and Knight Lore from Ultimate Play the Game — all from the same era, all on the Spectrum, all genuinely brilliant. Knight Lore in particular feels like seeing the future arriving in 1984. The transition from JSW’s flat 2D platforming to Knight Lore’s isometric world is dramatic even now.

If you’re thinking about how to get more of this kind of gaming on modern hardware, our piece on whether the Steam Deck is worth it for retro gaming over dedicated handhelds covers the emulation landscape well — Spectrum emulation on the Steam Deck via Fuse or ZXSpin is excellent, and the larger screen genuinely helps with the pixel-precise platforming that JSW demands.

Playing on Modern Hardware: Your Best Options in 2025

If you want to play this legitimately in 2025, you have a few solid options at different price points.

Original ZX Spectrum 48K: The most authentic option. Prices on eBay UK currently run between £40 and £120 depending on condition, with rubber-key models at the lower end and the later +2 variants at the higher end. You’ll need a working cassette deck or a TZXDuino device to load games. The TZXDuino is a small hardware device that plays ZX Spectrum tape files from an SD card through the cassette port — it costs around £25 to £35 built, or under a tenner in parts if you’re comfortable with a soldering iron and a bit of Arduino work. I built mine in an afternoon and it’s the single best upgrade I’ve ever made to a Spectrum setup.

ZX Spectrum Next: The officially crowdfunded modern recreation, based on FPGA technology. It runs essentially all original Spectrum software and adds a huge amount of modern quality-of-life features. It costs around £299 for the standard kit. It’s beautiful hardware and I use mine regularly, but it’s significant money for what is primarily a nostalgia machine. The Next handles JSW perfectly and the POKE system works identically.

Emulation via Fuse: Free, runs on everything, handles all the POKEs natively through the interface, and has excellent input response. If you’re serious about completing JSW without infinite lives, Fuse is arguably the most consistent platform because you can use save states for practice (learning room patterns, testing jump positions) without using them in your actual run. I think this is entirely fair — it’s no different to repeatedly attempting a hard section on original hardware, except it doesn’t cost you a life each time.

Dedicated retro handhelds: Spectrum emulation on handhelds like the Anbernic RG35XX or the Trimui Smart Pro is functional, but the small screens and default key mapping can make precise play harder. Our comparison of the Trimui Smart Pro against budget FPGA handhelds touches on Spectrum emulation quality in its emulation section if you want to go that route.

The Honest Assessment: Is This Worth Doing?

Yes. Emphatically, yes.

Completing Jet Set Willy on PAL ZX Spectrum without the infinite lives cheat is one of the most genuinely satisfying things I’ve done in my time with retro gaming, and that’s a list that includes completing Elite on the BBC Micro, finishing Super Metroid in under three hours, and getting a full score run on Bubble Bobble on the Amiga. JSW is different because it’s not just hard — it’s culturally significant in a way that’s specific to British gaming history. This was the game that kids on every street in 1984 Britain were playing, arguing about, and almost certainly lying about completing. Actually finishing it, on the intended platform, the hard way, with the bugs properly patched, feels like settling something that’s been outstanding for forty years.

The game itself, once you’ve internalised its logic, is genuinely elegant. The room designs are creative within their constraints. The guardian patterns, once memorised, feel like choreography rather than obstacles. The mansion as a whole has a coherent geography that rewards exploration. It’s not perfect — the bugs are inexcusable, the difficulty is occasionally arbitrary, and the ending is shorter than the loading time — but it’s a piece of British gaming history that deserves to be experienced properly.

If you’re the kind of person who finds this kind of thing appealing, you might also appreciate the broader context of where games like this sit in British culture. Our piece on why British TV never made gaming adaptations like The Last of Us is worth a read — the argument it makes about how Britain consumed gaming culture in the 1980s feels very relevant to understanding why JSW became the phenomenon it did.

Get the POKEs in. Learn The Bridge. Be patient in The Nightmare Room. When Maria finally steps aside and lets Willy go to bed, you’ll understand why forty years later, people are still writing guides about a Spectrum game where a man in pyjamas collects party debris.

Good luck. You’re going to need some of it. But less than you think.